EA’s Star Wars Game Cancellation Explained By Project Director

There was a lot of anticipation over Visceral's Star Wars videogame. Former Uncharted director and creator Amy Hennig was working on the project together with the studio, and Star Wars gamers were eager to learn more about the game. However, EA decided to cancel the game along with Visceral's shut down last year, leaving nothing but a major wave of disappointment.

While Hennig has refused to talk about the game and its development for quite a long time since the project's cancellation, the game director has recently decided to speak with Venture Beat, explaining why the Star Wars videogame never came to fruition.

According to Hennig, making the project was difficult because Visceral was a "very expensive" studio to run, mostly because of its location in the smack middle of San Francisco. Aside from that, the game ran into developmental projects as well – the engine was running on Frostbite, an EA engine that was originally made for first-person shooting game.

Frostbite was a major hurdle for the project because Hennig's Star Wars game was supposed to be a "cinematic traversal action game," not just a regular shooter.

"But we knew going in that was the goal," added Hennig. "We were going to put this functionality into Frostbite. A lot of the team was hired to do Battlefield, and so that was a bit of a cultural shift, to make this different kind of game. Normally you cache for the project you're making rather than trying to--it's hard to convert the people you have if that's not their type of game."

Not only that but at one point during development, EA decided to switch the game's direction and design in response to a market study so that players could "come back and enjoy for a long time to come." Hennig and her team had difficulty adjusting to this transition.

"I think that where EA is at right now, they're looking more at games as a service, the live service model," said Hennig. "More open world stuff, trying to crack that nut, versus this more finite crafted experience. We were trying to make sure that we built in other modes and extensibility and all that stuff. But the fundamental spine of the thing was more like Uncharted than one of these open world, live service games. That's a big gap to cross."

It's such a shame that EA had to drop Visceral and it's Star Wars game. Now, all that's left is Respawn's Star Wars Jedi: The Fallen Order, a game that everyone's eager to learn more about this April in Star Wars Celebration Chicago.

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